Minor Characters In Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness

Heart of Darkness is a novel of contrasts: light and dark, male and female, truth and deception; it is also a novel where minor characters serve a major function in the overall meaning of the book. One clear example of this is Kurtz’s Intended—she is the light and purity to Kurtz’s dark and evil side. Her naivety and idealism are a stark contrast to the harsh, primitive reality found in the depths of the Congo.
Her purity is also manifest in her physical description “This fair hair, this pale visage, this pure brow, seemed surrounded by an ashy halo from which the dark eyes looked out at me. Their glance was guileless, profound, confident, and trustful.” (3.53). The halo and “pure brow” match her idealistic infatuation with Kurtz—she sees him as godly man whose “goodness shone in every act" (3.70). She believes she is the main authority on his character and even deludes herself into believing she “understood him better than any one on earth" (3.59).

The Intended is the personification of man’s rejection of the inner evil found within.

The painting of "a woman, draped and blindfolded, carrying a lighted torch. The background was sombre—almost black. The movement of the woman was stately, and the effect of the torchlight on the face was sinister." (1.57). could be seen as a representation of Kurtz’s view of his Intended. The blindfold hides the torch from the woman’s eyes just as the Intended’s naivety and lack of worldly knowledge hide the truth of man’s evil. Her blindness is a form of denial as she knows it exists and yet because she cannot see it, it does not exist in her

world.
The Intended also stands as a manifestation of all women in England and other imperialistic nations—women were seen to be innocent and in need of sheltering from the harsh realities of the world’s evilness—something Marlow confirms when he says “We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own lest ours gets worse" (2.29). By keeping women blind to the crimes committed in the Congo and other colonized places, the men are able to maintain the delusion that they are doing this for the greater good and they have a place to wash away the blood of their crimes.
Her innocence contrasts severely with Kurtz’s darkness—much like the constraints of her society contrast greatly from the unadulterated freedom Kurtz found in the wild. This brings into question that if women were given this unrestricted freedom, would they give in to their inner darkness? Every human is capable of evil, yet society blindfolds them and renders them incapable of comprehending man’s inner evil. Marlow becomes a physical manifestation of the blindfold in the painting by lying about Kurtz’s life and death. He shades her from the malevolence of the world rather than revealing the harsh reality of what Kurtz had become—a manifestation of pure evil, an “animated figure of death” who decapitated people (source).